Optimized for touch-screens, it provides you with the ability to capture shop floor activities as they actually occur, and record operation status & quality information using both paper-less and paper-based methods.

Functional Overview

VWEB-lt is a thin-client data collection solution which is quickly and easily deployed across single or multiple remote sites with zero client installation. The system is fully self contained with it's own database and web control panel, is plug-and-play compatible with VISUAL, and does not require any modification to then standard VISUAL database. It supports SQLBase, SQLServer and Oracle database platforms.

It can also be deployed where employees are working off-site, for example where they are providing installation or maintenance activities at a customer's remote location.

Fully integrated with all the Infor VISUAL modules, data collected can be viewed and edited through the standard "Labor Ticket Entry" window, and reported through the standard VISUAL reports for efficiency, utilization, job costing, job status and all of the other numerous manufacturing reports.

Although optimized for touch-screen use, any device which includes a javascript-capable browser with a minimum 800 x 600 resolution screen and a mouse or other input device can be used.

VWEB-lt will allow you to implement a 'GREEN' and paperless shop floor, being web-based, it requires very little CPU processing power allowing you to use lower spec, lower cost and even older devices which may otherwise be discarded.

Why use Labour Tickets ?

Unlike an HR/Payroll system, which only makes use of the total hours worked by an employee, labour tickets are instead used by VISUAL to record which specific activities each employee actually spent their time on during each working shift.

A typical shop-floor working day may include time setting up a machine, directly working on one or more work orders, lunch and other breaks, as well as indirect time spent on activities, such as meetings, cleaning and machine break-downs.

In this closed-loop system, VISUAL allows you to record all of these different types of labour activities, and uses them to provide the following information:

Actual Machine Setup Time

Actual Operation Run Time

Actual Rework Hours

Actual Indirect Hours

Resource Efficiency

Resource Utilisation

Actual Labour Costs

Work Order Progress

Actual Yield / Scrap Rates

Scrap / Deviation Tracking

Real-Time Execution

Click on image to enlarge

Infor VISUAL provides users with the ability to record employee labour tickets through the standard 'Labour Ticket Entry' window. Tickets are manually entered using data from hand-written employee time sheets which are submitted at the end of each shift. This approach means that you have accurate records of how the employee spent their time, but also means that the data you see in VISUAL is only updated at the shift end.

VWEB-lt improves upon this by providing real-time data collection directly from the shop floor, with the result that at any time, you can see the status and cost of every job in your system, allowing you to become more proactive, and monitor and respond to conditions and events such as cost overruns, high scrap, poor efficiency and lack of progress against the plan quickly.

And when the customer calls you to find the status of their job, you can simply open the Manufacturing Window, select the job, and see at a glance it's current status, material availability, and even see who is working on it right now.

Wall Mounted Touch Panels

If you have ever seen or used a PC computer on a production shop floor, you will understand that the keyboard, mouse and the CPU main casing are simply not designed for the shop floor environment, and that the life of such equipment is often very short.

Our industrial specification, wall-mounted touch panels are compact and rugged, have no internal fans or moving parts, and are far better suited to the harsh shop floor environment than a commercial PC.

Being wall mounted, they are out of the way and free up valuable desk space. They are available with various hardware options such as RFID readers and bar code scanners and the operating system is designed to operate in 'kiosk mode' to only allow the units to be used for data collection. The only button available to the user is an on-off switch, which when pressed will either boot the system straight into the VWEB-lt screen, or power it down.

Paper-less and Paper-based

VWEB-lt can be used as either a paper-less, paper-based or in a combination of both methods. In a paper-less environment, there are no Work Order Travellers, instead the user selects the operation from a filtered list of work order operations on the screen. There are many configurable options to define how the available jobs are filtered and sorted for each employee, and how many levels of drill down selection there are from the Base ID to the operation.

In a paper-based environment, it also supports labour tracking with VISUAL's standard bar-coded Work Order Travellers. Employee ID cards can bar-coded, RFID or a combination of both.

Standard and Actual Time Tickets

The default method for labour ticket generation uses actual-time labour tickets. The server assigns timestamps to the labour tickets when an employee starts an activity and another when they have completed and stop the activity, the duration of the labour ticket is therefore the real-time spent between the start and end times.

Standard time tickets are processed differently. Instead of the employee creating a start ticket, then performing the activity, then creating a stop ticket, they only create a stop ticket after completing the activity. The system will generate the start ticket time automatically by using the operation's estimated time which is defined in the work order's run time variable.

Process Quality Control & Deviation Codes

Employees who stop a RUN operation are prompted to enter the qty good, as well as any deviated or scrap quantity. If the user enters a deviated qty then they have the option to select the 'Deviation Reason Codes' to classify the recorded defects.

These deviation codes are user defined through Visual, and can be used for quality and performance reporting. The user is able to select multiple deviation codes and record the qty for each deviation code selected.

Qty or Percentage Completion

When stopping a job at the end of a shift, or when finally completing a job, the user is prompted to enter the quantities completed and deviated. If the qty required is just one piece, and the duration of the operation extends over many days or weeks, then you would not see any incremental progress of the operation as the user will always enter zero as the qty complete until it is fully completed.

VWEB-lt allows the qty to be entered as a estimated running-total percentage completion rather than by using a finite qty. So if the user estimates that the job is 30% complete after the first day, they can enter 30% completed, each subsequent day they enter the estimated total percentage completion until it reaches 100%, at which point the labour ticket will be closed. If a percentage complete is less than a previous percentage, then it is ignored. This is very useful in project-based manufacturing where the quantity is always 1, and when the process time may be very long.

Automatic Language Selection

VWEB-lt is fully multi-lingual and the labels, buttons and prompts will automatically change to the preferred language of the user who is transacting, the default language can also be controlled.

Currently English, Bahasa Malay, Thai, Simplified Chinese and Vietnamese languages are available, however support for any language can easily be added through the use of language files.

Superuser Access

Using the web control panel, you can assign superuser authority to line leaders, supervisors and managers. These super users are able to create labour tickets for other employees, and are also able to clock-out employees who forgot to clock out at the end of the previous shift.

In order to maintain integrity, Employees who did not clock off the previous shift are prevented from starting a new shift until the previous shift ticket is closed off. With VWEB-lt a Superuser can quickly resolve this with one touch of the screen, this would otherwise require a user to login to VISUAL, open the Labour Ticket Window, select the labour ticket, edit the ticket and save it.